Corruption, Covenant, Cubits

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Genesis 6:1-4

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Well, this morning, as you perhaps see in the bulletin, the title,
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I have to already give a caveat that if I hadn't already printed the bulletins, that certainly would not be the title this morning,
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Corruption, Covenant, and Qubits, because I don't think we're going to make it to Covenant and Qubits this morning, and corruption's kind of a lousy title.
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So there's a lot going on in chapter six, and we need to take time to address it.
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And though we have been trying to pursue the forest more than the trees, there are some trees that are so tall and so complex that they capture our attention, and that happens to be the case this morning.
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Last week, we closed out the book of Adam, which goes, remember, all the way to chapter six, verse eight, and so the book of Adam runs from chapter five, verse one, to chapter six, verse eight, and then we begin with the book of Noah, beginning in chapter six, verse nine.
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This is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God, and Noah begot three sons,
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Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And so that was what we borrowed out of chapter six this morning.
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Of course, to borrow that, we skipped over the beginning of chapter six, and we want to look at chapter six as a whole between this week and next week.
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What we'll see, especially this morning, is a major emphasis on the corruption of creation, the corruption of creation through human sin, and God's response of judgment.
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And as we saw last week, God reveals his salvation through judgment. And I think we'll look at that perhaps.
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I don't think we'll make it there this morning. We'll try, but perhaps we'll see that next week.
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God's salvation through judgment, and specifically, how it comes by way of covenant. This is a rehearsal of what we've seen in Genesis chapter two, and Genesis chapter three as well, that God acts by way of covenant.
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When he arranges a way of interacting with man, of saving man, he does so by way of covenant, and we'll see that next week.
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God's covenant secures Noah on the basis of his salvation, and from it, we'll see the effects of God's grace in Noah's life.
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Noah believes the Lord. Noah obeys the Lord, down to the nitty gritty details, down to the cubit by cubit commandments.
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And so we read at the very end of chapter six, thus Noah did. Now, first things first, we have to navigate the first four verses.
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We have to navigate the Nephilim, the giants. Genesis six from the beginning, it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose.
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And the Lord said, my spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh.
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Yet his days shall be 120 years. There were giants on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them.
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Those were the mighty men who were of old men of renown. Notice the language here in verse two, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful and they took.
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Does that sound familiar? Seeing, seeing something pleasing to the eye and taking. It brings us back to Eve and her temptation in chapter three.
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And by the way, the Hebrew verb there for take, that's normally an idiom for marriage to take a wife unto yourself.
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And we find that throughout the Old Testament, certainly throughout Genesis. But that's not always the only way this verb is used.
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And so here the translator assumes that the sons of God are taking wives.
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Wives is added here. The verb is simply they took for themselves any they chose. That's, that's very straightforward.
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And so we have to kind of move beyond the assumption of the translators here because it's not explicit in the text.
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For example, the same verb, same exact verb is used in the tragic rape of Dinah in Genesis 34 when she came, the son of Hamor, the
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Hivite prince of the country country saw her, he took her and lay with her and defiled her.
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This was not a marriage. This was a violent seizure. And so perhaps here in Genesis six, we don't have wedding ceremonies, but rather a violent taking a violent seizing.
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So notice we have two groups. We have the sons of God on the one hand and the daughters of men on the other.
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These two groups are not further explained for us. We don't have a parentheses or a little footnote telling us here's what's going on with these two groups.
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All we can tell is that these two groups are contrasted from each other. And the result is given in verse four.
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There were giants. This is where we get the word Nephilim that could come from the verb
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Nephal, which means to fall. It could be another words, fallen ones. There were giants on the earth in those days and also afterward, perhaps meaning after the flood when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them.
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Those were the mighty men who were of old men of renown. What in the pre flood world is going on here?
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This is one of those passages where it's been debated ever since it was written.
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And really everything boils down. There's always variations, but everything really boils down to three main views.
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The oldest view going back to the ancient Jewish interpreters and the earliest of Christian traditions holds that the sons of God are angels, more specifically fallen angels, and that these angels in their fallen rebellion against God either took some sort of corporeal form, bodily fleshly form, or in some variations inhabited human beings, sort of a demonic possession.
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Either way, this view holds that this is the effect as they cohabited with the daughters of men that they bore giants,
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Nephilim, mighty ones, rulers. That's the first view. The oldest view. Second view.
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Another view goes back to the early church, though a little bit later, and it's been maintained really throughout
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Christian history. Perhaps this is the dominant view. We find it in Luther, Calvin, many contemporary reformed thinkers, is that the sons of God are the
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Sethite, the Sethite line, the sons of God, the sons of the elect line, the godly line.
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Those, in other words, as we saw in chapter four, who called upon the name of the Lord at the very end of his genealogy.
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And so in this view, the issue is there's a mixing of marriage going on here. The Sethites, the sons of God, are marrying themselves to the
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Cainite daughters of men. That's the view. And so there's this corruption that takes place and it leads to depravity.
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Third view. I'll unpack these as we move forward. A third view, a more recent view, though you find some older variations of it, would see simply the sons of God as rulers, basically kings from the
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Cainite line. And the claim in this view is that in ancient Near Eastern literature, we have pagan rulers who refer to themselves as gods or they claim to be divine offspring.
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And so the thought is that these were the mighty men, kind of men like Lamech, who took for themselves any woman they chose.
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They built themselves harems. And these were the mighty men. They were like giants. A variation on that in the
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Greek is they were violent men, violent men. And they built empires, something like Nimrod on the way toward Babel.
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So this is another view, in other words, Cainite rulers. Well, these verses have been debated for millennia, and we're not going to solve the debate here in 45 minutes this morning.
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We're not even going to break new ground. The complexity of this passage should, first of all, humble us, and then we should respect it.
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We should respect that in Scripture, as Peter reminds us, there are some things that are hard to understand. And this is one of them.
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This is one of those passages where there are things that are hard to understand. And so we humbly confess that here we have some mystery and not a lot.
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Not all is plain. Not all is alike. Clear to us. At the same time, we can weigh these different views against one another and try to get a sense if there's any other parallels in Scripture that might help us favor one over the others.
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So I I'm offering this humbly. You'll see I'm leaning in a certain direction, but I admit every view has its strengths.
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Every view has its question marks. OK, so this is not the only way you might come up and say, yes, but don't you see this?
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Don't you see this? And I'll amen you. Everything I've looked over the past few weeks, I find convincing every time
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I'm like, yes, that view nails it. Let's go to this view. OK, they got it right. Let's go to this view.
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All right. They're right, too. What's going on? Starting with the last view, the most recent view, the
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Canine King's view. This to me seems to be the easiest one to dismiss. In fact, it's rarely held by anyone in the past and it's rarely held by anyone in the present.
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It's certainly true that ancient Near Eastern rulers claim to be divine offspring, but they are never, absolutely never referred to as sons of God.
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There's no inscription. There's no literary manuscript that we have that ever refers to an ancient
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Near Eastern ruler as sons of God or sons of a God. It simply does not exist. For this title to be used without qualification here then does not support the claim.
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If this was a title that could be understood by the readers of Genesis, you would expect that it would be commonplace enough for us to find.
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We have plenty of literature inscriptions from that time period. We simply just don't have ancient rulers referred to in this way as this group.
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Secondly, this view would not explain why Nephilim or giants are descending from them unless you only take
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Nephilim to be not a literal physical description, but rather something figurative of their might or the prowess or their violence, which certainly is something true.
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But I tend to think that's true because they were physically tall, because they were giants. That's why they were violent and mighty.
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That's why they could rule and dominate. What this view has going for it is the sense of giant or mighty one being about domination.
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That's a theme we've seen up to this point. The whole emphasis in the Cainite line is they're building cities.
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They're building empires. Lamech is a violent man. And so that's going to continue to apex all the way to Babel.
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And so perhaps we have this parallel from 1 Chronicles 1. We begin with the genealogy, Adam, Seth, Enosh, Canaan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth.
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Down the line of Ham, in 1 Chronicles 1, we read, Kush begot Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth.
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Now, Nimrod is very significant in the establishment of Babel, which in Genesis is sort of the the beginning of this great theme of the city of man, as opposed to the city of God.
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And notice this verb. It's translated here as an aggressive. He began to be a mighty one.
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Notice that he's not a mighty one. He began to be a mighty one. In other words, he began to dominate.
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He began to accumulate. He began to exercise power and build for himself stature. He became this.
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It's not that he was a giant in the sense. He became this. That might be significant to show us that the
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Nephilim, it's more about their ability to reign and to dominate. That's the strength of this view. But I don't think it squares with all of the details.
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So, for instance, the Nephilim that we find in Numbers 13, they're the giants in the land.
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Is that what Moses means when he says both before and after these were the giants? It seems to be a physical description.
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What's the relationship between the Nephilim and the Anakim? We have sons of the giant one.
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Is that just a ruler? There's many other rulers. They're not referred to in that way at that time. So there's questions that I don't think this view can answer.
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Let's move on to the next view. The second view, this line of Seth view, the view that the problem is mixed marriage between the
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Sethites and the Canines. This has, as I've mentioned, become the most dominant view, and it has a lot of strengths going for it.
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The biggest strength to my mind is it keeps the narrative flow. We've been emphasizing all along the significance of the
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Sethite line through which God is going to bring about redemption culminating in Jesus Christ versus the
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Canine line. The sons of God in this view were chosen men set apart by their lineage, and no wonder we find
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Israel doing the very same stumbling. They stumble in that they don't keep to a holy society, but they mix into pagan and worldly marriages and so defile themselves and defile the land.
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So perhaps here the sons of God are bringing about their own ruin, and that's what's being emphasized.
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By the late third century, about 1700 years ago, Christian interpreters took this view for granted.
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It would have been very rare to find anything but this view. Interestingly, the reason this became so popular from what
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I've read is because there was a lot of controversy about how to understand Christ. What's the nature of Christ?
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How is he fully man and fully God? And these Christological controversies led them to be very careful about talking about angels taking on human form or taking on flesh.
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Because there were some views, some heretical views that claimed Christ was simply the chief angel or Christ was sort of an appearance in the flesh similar to angels.
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And so that's why they distanced this view. Augustine, for example, one of the greatest of church fathers, says there is therefore no doubt that there were many giants before the deluge.
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So he's saying, he says in the same context, you know, don't we know of that giant woman in Rome?
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And he's just saying, oh, there's always been giants. That doesn't seem to be what Moses is trying to emphasize.
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But listen to him. There is therefore no doubt that there were many giants before the deluge and that these were citizens of the earthly society of men and that the sons of God who were according to the flesh, the sons of Seth sank into this community and they forsook righteousness.
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So this is how Augustine is taking it. And it pleased the creator to produce them so that it could be demonstrated that neither beauty nor size nor strength are of importance to a wise man because his blessedness lies in spiritual and immortal blessings that are far better and far more enduring.
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You see, the whole point of the offspring is you can have the beauty. You can have a harem.
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You can have the power. You can be a dominant ruler. You can have physical strength and height, but that's not going to matter.
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That's not going to escape God's judgment. That's Augustine's point. Luther. Similarly, the sons of God are those male descendants who have the promise of the gospel from Genesis 3 15.
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Calvin explains, Moses does not distinguish the sons of God from the daughters of men because they were dissimilar or of different origin, but because they were sons of God by adoption whom he set apart for himself.
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It was therefore in gratitude in the line of Seth to mingle with the children of Cain.
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It was an intolerable profanation to pervert and confound the order appointed by God. So there it is.
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Luther, Calvin, Augustine, the giants of church history take the giants to just happen to be a phenomenon, but it's simply human lines, the line of Seth and the line of Cain intermarrying and mixing.
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And Calvin says this perverts the order appointed by God. Well, the problem with that is that God never appoints such an order.
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He doesn't restrict marriage to the Sethites and the Cainites. As far as we know, we never read that at this stage in human history, there's a forbidding of intermarriage.
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In fact, we assume there was much intermarriage among the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. Further, why would the sons of God be contrasted to the daughters of men?
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Notice that the sons of God, the daughters of men. Do you see that contrast? Was it only mixed marriage one way?
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Why not say sons of God and daughters of Cain? If that was the whole point you were trying to make, why make the contrast between divine and human in other words?
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And how does intermarriage between two human lines produce Nephilim giants?
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If we understand them to be something more than just violent men, the phrase sons of God to further make this a problematic view, the phrase sons of God always, always, always refers to angels in the
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Old Testament. In fact, if sons of God here means sons of Seth, it would be the only place in the entire
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Old Testament where sons of God refers to something non -angelic. Sons of God always refers to angels in the
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Old Testament. And we're not given an explanation to view this any differently.
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Further, and this brings us really to our last view, the fallen angels view, which you can tell perhaps by now, this is the view
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I'm leaning toward. This view assumes what the earliest Jewish readers, the earliest
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Jewish interpreters assumed. The sons of God are the sons of God. They are the angels and their behavior is to praise such that they are fallen.
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Perhaps that's why their offspring are called the fallen ones, the Nephilim. Again, the phrase sons of God is set in deliberate, deliberate contrast to the daughters of men as though they were two different kinds.
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Now, the problem is obviously this view requires a very strange thought that somehow angels, spiritual, immortal beings could physically copulate and reproduce with human women who are not according to their kind.
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That's a problem. We don't understand how that works. And for some, because we cannot understand how that works, it's far too fantastical.
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Calvin, this is not, you know, David Hume here. This is John Calvin writing centuries before the enlightenment.
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Calvin says that ancient figment concerning intercourse of angels with women.
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It's abundantly refuted by its own absurdity. It's surprising that learned men should formerly have been fascinated by raving so gross.
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So he just says, this is absurd. This is ridiculous to consider. Well, it may seem absurd to our concepts, to our standards, but that is no argument against it.
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We're speaking of the intersection between earthly norms and supernatural realities.
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And then we have to filter out the fact that we're living in a post -enlightenment materialistic atmosphere where we automatically disdain things that smack of the supernatural.
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We have a disdain for things that seem mystical or spiritually mysterious. I was reminded of this recently last year,
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I had to do an assignment where as a sort of capstone for my MDiv, I had to make a personal confession of faith.
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And I had to have all the major categories of Christianity and just kind of give my views and scriptural defense for that.
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Well, I'm very thankful that I'm a confessional Christian because it was very easy to just say 1689 copy paste.
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I did do some work though. Of course, I made it personal. And one of the criticisms
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I had on that was you had no angelology. You never addressed angels.
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This is great textbook, Protestant theology, but you never talked about an angel.
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You never talked about angels. Angels are in the Bible. It's like, yeah, you're right.
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That's interesting. Interesting that I don't ever really consider that or think of that. My Christianity really has no use for angels or angelology.
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Well, it is, of course, all over the scriptures. I was reading one commentator this week who said this.
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It's an ancient superstition. Common sense ought to prevail over mystical fantasy.
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No, common sense is often stained by the prevailing winds of the day. Common sense is often stained by cultural assumptions.
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Philosophical assumptions. Common sense is something that we produce to sort of shackle ourselves or move ourselves away from what
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God has revealed. It's not that common sense reveals over what we declare to be too fantastical to absurd.
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No, biblical revelation ought to prevail over common sense. We're Christians.
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We believe in scripture, sola scriptura, right? So let's be very careful to not wave out of hand things that we deem too far fetched.
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That's not how we approach scripture. What God reveals is true. If it's true that he's revealed it and that's the case you have to make, then we simply submit and we say amen.
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Dwayne Garrett says the ancient Hebrew would take this to mean that angelic beings somehow took on corporeal form bodily form as males and had sexual relations with women.
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And this is how all of the ancient Jewish interpreters took it. This does not really contradict the teaching of Jesus that angels do not marry and thus are presumably without gender since clearly what the angels do here is illicit and represents an abandoning of their proper place.
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We're going to circle back to that. Garrett says, I suspect the real reason modern people reject this interpretation is they simply find it too far fetched.
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And that's been my experience. Oh, that sounds ridiculous, says Calvin. It does, but that's not an argument against it.
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If that's what's being revealed. Now, what is Garrett referencing? Because this is a very good counterpoint to the view he's referencing
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Matthew 22. You remember the Sadducees are there to challenge Jesus. The Sadducees, unlike the
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Pharisees, deny the resurrection, the bodily resurrection at the end. And so they're trying to present a hypothetical case that will stump
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Jesus. And their case is simply this. There's a man who dies. And so following Leverett law, his brother goes into his wife and provides for her, marries her, and then he dies.
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And so the next brother then goes in, marries the wife and so on all the way down the line. They die.
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Unfortunate family. But all these brothers die one after the other. And this woman is now the widow to six. And then this is the challenge at the resurrection.
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Whose wife will she be? And what the Sadducees want the answer to be is, oh, that's just ridiculous.
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There must be no resurrection. So we can't we can't handle thinking like that. That was their gotcha hook. And Jesus says, basically, in very polite words, you're so ignorant.
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You don't know the scriptures. You don't even know the power of God already. He's taking them down a peg.
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And then he says this at the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. They will be like the angels in heaven.
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Now we assume. Therefore, angels do not marry. Perhaps angels cannot express sexuality.
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Angels are not even gendered. And we build that all on assumptions from Matthew 22. But please notice
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Jesus is talking about angels in heaven. In other words, he's talking about holy angels.
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And he's not talking about fallen angels in this context. He's talking about holy angels and what they do not do.
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Holy angels do not marry. OK, and we'll be like holy angels in that we won't be given in marriage or marry.
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He's not clarifying what angels are capable of doing. He's simply saying what holy angels do not do.
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They do not marry. Holy angels do not marry and will be like them. He does not say it's impossible for an angel to copulate, to reproduce, to desire sexuality, to somehow express that physically.
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He does not address any of that. This point builds into what I think is the most convincing evidence for this view.
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The sons of God being fallen angels, Jude. This is this is probably the biggest point.
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Jude compares the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah with the sin of angels in a way that seems very similar in Genesis six.
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In fact, I think he's building on Genesis six. So this is what Jude writes. Jude six, pay very close attention to this.
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And the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode.
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He has reserved an everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them in a similar manner to these having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh.
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They are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Did you catch that?
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Listen very carefully. The angels who did not keep their proper domain, left their own abode,
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Sodom and Gomorrah in a similar manner to these giving themselves over to sexual immorality and going after strange flesh.
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Now, every now and then, a little Greek grammar is tremendously helpful. Doesn't happen often, but here is one of those times and one of those places where the precision of Greek is tremendously insightful.
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When we read in the translation in a similar manner to these, we have a pronoun and that reflexive pronoun is saying, it's a comparative pronoun.
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It's saying in a manner similar to these. And the question is, what's these? Whatever these is referring to is what we call the antecedent.
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Now, in English, we don't have a way of tracing the antecedent. The context has to make it clear. These must be referenced to that.
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Is it referenced to the cities, referenced to the judgment? In English, we don't know.
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In Greek, it's precise enough that it has to be linked. It has to agree what we say in gender and number.
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And here it can only agree with angels. So that means we should read it this way, because in the
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Greek, it's crystal clear in a similar manner to these. These is representing angels, the angels.
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That means we ought to read it this way. What Sodom and Gomorrah did in sexual immorality and going after strange flesh is similar in manner to the angels who left their own abode.
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In other words, Jude is saying that like the angels, the men of Sodom and Gomorrah gave themselves over to sexual immorality and went after strange flesh.
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And that was an abandoning of their proper place. And so the fallen angels view to my mind is confirmed by Jude and also second
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Peter, which I'll mention in a moment. And both of them are reflecting awareness of first Enoch, which is a book we've already referenced a book outside of the canon.
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But very influential in certain parts were quoted. What we know of holy angels is consistent with this view.
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Angels can do physical things. Angels can assume physical human form. We're going to see that as we move forward in Genesis.
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Angels appear to Abraham and they look like men. In fact, they sit down and eat with him in Genesis 18. The angels who go to Sodom and Gomorrah sit with Lot and they eat what
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Lot provides for them. And surprisingly, the men of Sodom try to actually assault sexually assault. These angels in Genesis 19.
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It would hardly be a surprise that such demonically derived offspring would have supernatural strength, have supernatural wisdom and insight and engineering and domineering and would have a physical ability to reign and exercise power.
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Do you remember in the Gospels when Jesus comes to the Gadarene demoniac and they could not bind him?
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He was living in a cave, naked, howling, and he was a terror to the countryside there, but they couldn't constrain him.
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In fact, they try with chains, but he would break them. I remember seeing videos of cops.
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I vicariously experienced what Sergeant Brown maybe has to deal with in watching old cops episodes.
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And, you know, you'll see some drug addict and they'll, of course, be in a run and have their hands handcuffed.
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They'll say, Officer, I'm going to break these handcuffs. I'm going to break these handcuffs. And the handcuffs never break.
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Now, they're hopped up. The drugs have given them strength, but not that kind of strength. Not Clark Kent kind of strength.
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Well, that's not so with the Gadarene demoniac. He breaks chains. He breaks chains.
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It's supernatural. Supernatural. Very fascinating. This is a footnote.
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Very fascinating that when Legion cries out, you know, have you come to judge us before the time, before the appointed time?
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And they basically beg, you know, you know, don't cast us into the abyss.
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Don't cast us into the deep. And in Mark's gospel, when
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Jesus cast them into the swine, the swine barrel off the cliff. And a lot of translations,
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I think the ESV gets it right. A lot of translations say, and they fell into the sea. It doesn't say sea.
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It says abyss. That's very significant. Very significant. When we look at what Jude is trying to tell us, these demons that did not stay in their proper place, these fallen angels, they didn't stay in their proper place.
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They desired something physical, something corporeal. They began to torment men. And they're reserved in judgment.
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They're reserved in a deep and dark place under chains, under torment. And it seems to be that Legion knows that's where Jesus is going to send them.
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He's going to send them to the abyss. To be reserved there, along with the fallen angels here from Genesis 6, until that day of judgment.
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Until that last day. Derek Kidner says, the craving of demons for a body, which is evident in the gospels, offers at least some parallel to this lust for sexual experience.
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Just to reinforce this evidence, and this will be the last point we make on this. Second Peter, chapter 2, verses 4 and following, we see the same dynamic.
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Fallen angels, and then a reference to the flood, and then a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. So it's parallel with Jude, second
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Peter 2, 4 and 5. If God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment, and did not spare the ancient world, but saved
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Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness. And he goes on. So just notice again, angels are cast into chains of darkness, just like Jude.
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And it's in the sweep of the days of Noah. It's in the context of the flood, just like Jude. And then it goes on to Sodom.
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In other words, he's hovering over the narrative of Genesis, speaking about angels. So when we read that, we shouldn't think this is the initial fall of the angels at the beginning.
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We should think of this as the sin of leaving their abode in Genesis 6. Well, that's the view
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I'm leaning toward. And though it was the ancient view of the
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Jews and the earliest Christians, like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, by the fourth century, all the way till today, it hasn't been the dominant view.
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I think now most scholars hold to it. I'd say, though, still, the
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Sethide and mixed marriage view is the most dominant. I was reading, this is an early church father, Theodoret Osiris.
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He said, some mad fools hold the sons of God to be angels. Well, there you go. I'm a mad fool because I hold the sons of God to be angels.
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But let's move on in chapter 6. Now that you're probably more confused than you realized you could be about that passage.
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The chapter 6 is emphasizing anything. It's emphasizing the corruption of sinful humanity.
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In fact, we see a threefold description beginning with chapter 6, verses 5 through 7.
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Then again in 11 through 13. And then again in verse 17, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
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And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth and he was grieved in his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom
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I've created from the face of the earth. Verse 11, the earth also was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence.
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And God looked upon the earth and indeed it was corrupt. For all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.
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And God said to Noah, the end of all flesh has come before me. For the earth is filled with violence through them.
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And behold, I will destroy them with the earth. And then verse 17, behold, I myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is in the breath of life.
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Everything that is on the earth shall die. Well, we have a lot to wonder about the first four verses.
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There's nothing to wonder about after that, is there? We don't have to wonder about the reason God is sending the flood.
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He makes it clear three times and it's crystal clear. It's made abundantly, tragically, repeatedly clear that God is sending the flood as a response to human sinfulness.
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Now, building on a point made last week, some have imagined that the flood is response to the verses we just considered verses one through four.
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But that is simply not the case. It's explicit in verse five. The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
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Then we have the result in verse seven. So I will destroy. You see, the reasons given in verse five.
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And if you were to ask the question, when was the wickedness of man so great?
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What's in view? Was it simply the last generation of the flood? Or was it humanity as a whole, even going back generations?
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And then I think we answered that a little bit last week. We have to keep in mind this larger structure of the genealogies.
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We said that the book of Adam goes all the way to verse eight. And that means that even the verses we're considering now are still part, or at least referencing back to chapter five.
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In fact, verse one of chapter six points us back to that earlier time. In other words, the wickedness the
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Lord sees is not simply the last generation, not simply the flood generation. It's depicting humanity over several generations.
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This is all the fallout from the fall. And notice how this is reinforced because it's echoing creation.
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Notice the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. What did we read at the beginning of Genesis?
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The Lord would make something, and the Lord saw that it was good. The Lord made something. He saw that it was good, and it was very good.
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You see, he would see something and then declare that it was good. But here he sees what he has made, and it has become corrupt.
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It has become something evil. It's filled with violence. That itself is a corruption. Twice we read the earth was filled with violence.
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What did God commission Adam and Eve to do? In Genesis 128 to fill the earth and subdue it.
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They were to be his image bearers in righteousness. They were to fill the earth as reflections of him with glory and beauty and justice.
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But what are they filling the earth with? Violence, corruption, sin. This is the anti -creation mandate.
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And because they're corrupting the earth, God says, I will destroy you with the earth. So this is now decreation.
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Now the order that God has established where man was to dominate as a steward over creation.
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Now creation is going to dominate him. Now creation is going to revolt against him and destroy him.
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We have three descriptions of sinfulness, three declarations of judgment. We have a verdict upon man's sin.
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As Jeff Thomas says, this is not a verdict of prejudice. This is not a verdict of partiality or bigotry or animosity.
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It's not the verdict of a primitive people. It's not the verdict of men and women with limited knowledge.
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It's not the verdict of hate -filled, depraved bigots. It's not the verdict of self -interest.
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It's the verdict of God. It's the verdict of omniscient holiness. It's the verdict even of divine pity.
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God sees. God sees as we saw with Cain inwardly.
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He discerns the thoughts, the motives, the secret intents of the heart. He looks outwardly at the earth and then inwardly to man.
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He sees what the hearts are producing thoughts that are evil continually. And we're reminded as God looks both outwardly and inwardly that he sees in a compass and in a detail and with an objectivity and a perfect comprehension that we cannot even imagine.
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He sees utterly unlike us because he is utterly unlike us. He looks in ways that we cannot.
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He sees with the clarity we simply do not possess. We see, you and I see, the best in ourselves and the worst in others, right?
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We kind of grade ourselves on a curve and we see the worst in others. We're very charitable to our own sins and foibles, very uncharitable to those of others.
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But even that worst, even that worst that we see in others is outward only.
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And it's bound by our own dull and blind senses. And so we're not actually looking at it rightly.
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We're not looking at it objectively. We're looking at it skewed, mutated with sinful rationale in a hateful way.
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And we're not horrified by it because we're holy. We're perhaps annoyed by it because we're selfish.
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Or we minimize it because we're lazy and passive. In other words, we cannot begin to imagine what an omniscient, holy
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God can see in us and around us. But here we have the verdict. God sees wickedness upon the face of the earth.
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Every intent of the thought of his heart was only evil continually.
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Think about how emphatic that is. I mean, that's like a five -fold emphasis.
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Let's just say, and he had evil thoughts. Every intent of every thought of his heart was only evil continually.
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That's true of every single person, including
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Noah, until God's grace found him. And then we read verse six,
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I think one of the most striking verses of all. The Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth.
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It's literally the Lord repented that he had made man on the earth. And he was grieved in his heart.
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God is not arbitrary. God is not capricious. We don't think upon him as a man, as a creature like us, bounded by the limitations we're bounded by.
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And yet, here he reveals himself in man -like language. Here we have this incredible statement of God's reaction to sinfulness.
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And we find, and this is a marvel, God grieving. If you read past that without pausing to ponder that, you've read too quickly.
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You're not reading with your eyes open. God is grieving. That's God's initial reaction to sin.
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We know what's coming. For most of the pre -flood world, they will go on as they go on, living in days of merriness, debauchery, and then one day the rains will come and they'll never stop coming.
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They'll never know the window that's been opened here. They'll never know that for 120 years and beyond,
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God was grieving. God was grieving. Now, God's grief is not misplaced.
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This isn't something out of turn or out of character for God, because God does not repent or change his mind as humans do.
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So it's literally repented here. But we have to be reminded that God does not repent in the way that we do, meaning change, to change one's mind, to turn around.
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God does not turn or change or shift. We see this in 1
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Samuel 15. God repents at the beginning of 1 Samuel 15. God repents that he made
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Saul king over Israel. And then a few paragraphs down, Saul says, Samuel says,
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God is not a man that he would repent nor change. So right there, we're already understanding there's a difference between what
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God's repentance means versus man's repentance. God does not change because God does not react in the way that humans react, as though something unpredictable took hold of him in the flow of time.
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God is outside of time. Time is a creature that God has made. And he exists within the context of his own eternity, within his own infinity.
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And therefore, everything is known to God. That's what we mean when we say God is omniscient. There is nothing that is not known to God.
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God knows all things and the possibilities of all things. He knows all things, whether they happen or not, all things, whether one molecule shifts to the left in the cosmos, off a distant moon in Venus.
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God knows the eventuality that would take place throughout the cosmos. He knows all things that can be known. There is nothing that can be known that God does not know it.
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God is omniscient. That means that he knew when he created human beings, they would sin and they would grieve him.
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And he still made human beings. Even in their fallen rebellion, he upholds a world for them out of his great love.
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We're going to be heading to look at the flood, and God is going to drown all life. But before you look there, the atheist, the skeptic wants to immediately turn there.
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How could a good God do this? I'd say pause and wait, pause and wait. Here we find
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God grieving over the debauchery and the violence and the corruption of man. He's grieving.
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And in his grief, he is upholding a world that bears sun and seed and harvest and meals around the dinner table and children and grandchildren and birthday parties and weddings.
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While he's grieving, he's upholding a world for them to enjoy. A world that they're corrupting and defiling.
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So before you jump to the judgment, look at the love of God, the tremendous outpouring of God's compassion that he'll grieve for over a century before he sends the flood that he's warned about.
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He gives good things to those whose hearts are set against him. Those who blaspheme his holy name.
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Those who degrade themselves and defile the glory in which they were made and are unjust and violent toward their neighbors.
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Those who are provoking God's anger all the day. We read in 1 Peter 3, when once the divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah.
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That's what Peter's picking up on. Longsuffering. He's patient.
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And his patience is not passivity. I just don't even want to think about it. He's constantly upholding, constantly working all the good things that wicked men and women enjoy.
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You know, if this abortion bill goes through, this should just stagger us. If someone could give birth to a child that God knit together in the mother's womb and just leave it to die.
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Just leave it to die and then go to have a meal and take a breath and smile or laugh.
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A year, a week, a month, decades later. That they could enjoy anything in this life. It's just the mercy of a
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God full of compassion. The Lord was sorry that he made man on the earth.
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He was grieved in his heart. He grieves longsuffering.
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He suffers long. Now we have to be really careful when we use this language of God.
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Because God does not suffer. It's not as though, in other words,
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God has some sudden dimming of his eternal blessedness. He's eternally blessed. It's not there's some sudden lack now that needs to be fulfilled in God.
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We know that God only allows us for the sake of his larger plan, his eternal plan, which comprises the flood and the ark as a greater fulfillment, which will redeem human sin through Christ.
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We know that. But that does not take away from the window that God opens here. He was sorry that he made man.
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So grievous was the corruption, the defilement of sin. He repented that he made man. He was grieving in his heart.
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It's very personal language. It's what we call technically anthropomorphic language, right?
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Anthropos being man or human morph to change. So this is language morphing into human -like terms or concepts.
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More specifically, this is an anthropopathism. Pathos, passio, Latin for emotion.
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This is a man -like emotion, a man -like passion. God is not a grandfather, you know, weeping and biting his nails and wishing there was something he could do.
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We have to be very careful that we never make God like a man, like a human being. But we have to at the same time make sure that we don't just dismiss this language.
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This is revelation from God. This language does not make God into a human.
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We should not think that God is somehow changing a condition in his being. He cannot change. We change all the time as human beings.
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We go from one state to another, from one condition to another. God never changes. He's the same yesterday, today and forever.
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Since there's no potentiality with God, he's not on the verge of becoming something other than he is.
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He simply is. I am who I am. We say theologically God is pure act. There's no potential.
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He's just pure act. That means there can be no change, no potentiality, no differentiation.
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Another way of talking about this, God is simple. The simplicity of God. He's not composed of parts nor passions, as our confession says.
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God's not a pie chart of his attributes. You know, Captain Planet being assembled by all these different forces.
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No, he is identical with his attributes. He has the attribute of holiness.
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He is holy. He's the attribute of justice. He is just. He is what his attributes are.
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He's not more or less than any of them. He is all of them all of the time with no potential, with no change.
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That means that as far as his passions go, his emotional life is not like ours. It's not fickle like ours.
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It cannot change or be acted against in his will like ours. The theologians here, we talk about God being impassable.
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Now you should know this is a maybe another footnote since we're already digging deep in technical stuff this morning.
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Let's just keep going a little bit deeper. This has been a controversy in the past few years. The impassability of God.
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There's been a number of books that have come out that have tried to challenge this idea that historically in Western theology,
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God is impassable, does not have passions because he cannot change. And we look at this biblical language like here in Genesis 6, 6, and we say you got to give us something more than that.
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Maybe impassable is not the best way to think of God. Maybe there is some way that he experiences the change of suffering.
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Maybe God is possible in some mysterious way. And so a number of books have been written about this, even from good reformed
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Baptist. There's been some pretty big splits over this specific issue of God's impassability.
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You should know what I would say is we cannot abandon the impassability of God.
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We cannot abandon it. But that does not mean that does not mean that we don't sit and marvel at what
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God has condescended to reveal about himself. He is impassable, but look at how he's revealing himself here.
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Look at how he's revealing himself here. Language familiar to human emotion, language that is highlighting his disgust, his abhorrence for sin.
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Not like some surprise, not some knee -jerk reaction, but condescended language to show sin grieves him.
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It grieves him. So we're holding on to God's simplicity, but we're marveling at what he's revealed here.
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God is choosing to grieve fallen men and women. What is grieving but bearing the pain of something?
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God is choosing not to destroy, but to bear the pain of human existence and human sinfulness.
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Doesn't that come to its height, to its climax in the person and work of Jesus Christ, where God quite literally bears the grief and the sins of his people.
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Surely this leads us to the cross. If I could see man and I could see sin to the depth and the clarity and the comprehensiveness that God sees,
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I would know, and this is against these skeptics and new atheists, I would know I could never have more pity than God.
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If you ever get into thinking, you think about your poor aunt or your poor loved one who doesn't know
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Christ and he's going to hell and you're tempted to think, oh, if only I had the ability to save them, surely
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I would show more compassion. Let me just say, how dare you? Do you honestly think you have more compassion than God who is love?
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Who is love? No, we cannot even begin to imagine the pity that God has.
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We only have a window cracked open here. God is grieving over the sinfulness of man. We're indifferent to it.
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Oh, they weren't that bad. If only God could spare them, surely if I were God, I could. You don't see like God sees.
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You don't grieve like God grieves. You don't know the compassion of the true living God. One day we'll all know it.
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Whether unregenerate or regenerate, whether saved or damned, we'll all know it. And every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is
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Lord in heaven and in hell. If I were
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God, as the saying goes, heaven would be empty and hell would be overflowing. That's the reality.
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Start there. If you were God, there'd be no one in heaven but you. And hell would be overflowing.
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The mystery of God's judgment is not that sinful humanity is judged. It's that Noah is saved.
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That's the marvel. That's the mystery. Why would you save Noah? Why would you recreate humanity through him?
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Why would you bear with sinfulness again? The Lord was sorry that he made man on the earth.
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He was grieved in his heart. Horatious Bonner. I've been really enjoying reading lately. He says of this, the expression is so strong, it's startling.
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It makes us ask, is it right to speak this way of God? It is right to speak this way.
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God speaks of himself this way. Look how deep the insight he gives us into his heart.
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How marvelous this yearning over rebellious man. God is grieved at his heart. These are his own words.
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Let's not explain them away. He's grieved at the results of sin upon the work of his hands.
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He's grieved at the dishonor that's brought upon himself and upon his image bearers. He's grieved at man's misery and man's ruin, which is so fearful and so eternal.
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And then how should we react? If God is grieved by sin in this way, shouldn't we be grieved by sin?
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Shouldn't I be grieved at my sin, at the sin around us? If God sees to the secret thoughts and intents of my heart and where there's sin, his spirit is grieved.
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And it's possible for me to grieve him. Should I not then hate what he hates and strive after a pleasing of him that comes through faith and obedience and praise and gratitude for the gift of Christ Jesus and the righteousness that he provides?
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Calvin says, well, we're going to try to redeem Calvin since I think he botched his view of the fallen angels.
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But let's redeem Calvin. Calvin's right to say, let us learn to abhor and flee from sin.
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This fatherly goodness and tenderness ought to subdue in us the love of God.
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Since God, in order more effectively to pierce our hearts, clothes himself with our affections.
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Do you see what Calvin is saying there? That God is clothing himself with our affections, our emotions, our language so that he can pierce our hearts more readily.
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He wants us to know something about what sin is and what sin does and how he looks at it. And so he uses this language.
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He's grieved by it. So again, God is other. He's not like us. He's utterly transcendent, utterly set apart, utterly other than humanity.
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We cannot comprehend the divinely infinite God. And yet the divinely infinite
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God comprehends us and condescends to us. This time of year, we celebrate that uniquely.
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As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, the infinity dwindled to infancy. It's the incarnation.
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It's the ultimate condescension of God. God reveals language of grieving and sorrow as though he were a man.
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And then in the fullness of time, he enters flesh, and he actually becomes a man. And the
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God who declares his grief over sinful man becomes a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief.
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You see, if there's any doubt about how grief is operating here, as though, well, let me just use this human word that I'm completely indifferent to and detached from.
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Then we completely misunderstand why when God takes on flesh, he becomes a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
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This is the God of Genesis 6 walking among us, walking in the world, perceiving the thoughts and intents of man's heart.
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And he's a man of sorrows. He's acquainted with grief. And therefore, he's able to bear our weaknesses.
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He's able to sympathize with our needs. He comes fully identified with my infirmity.
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On the cross, he's fully constituted in my sinfulness. And God grieves.
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And God grieves as he pours out wrath upon his beloved son. Do you know this
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God? What we've been seeing in Genesis, if you were to only build a theology on who
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God is from Genesis 1 to chapter 6, what could you know about God? We've already talked a little bit just from Romans 1 about his power, his omnipotence, all the things that belong to him as creator.
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But what would you know about him as redeemer? What would you know about this personal God who says sin is crouching at the door?
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You must resist it. Who takes sinful men and women and gives them grace to call upon his name.
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This God who's so personal, he walks with rebellious men and women. He calls them into a fellowship, into a communion with him.
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And then when he sees sinfulness at its height, he grieves. He grieves over sin. Do you know this God? Do we think of God in this way?
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Is God infinite enough to be nothing like me and yet personal enough to occupy his concern with my life and my walk and my daily pursuit?
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But his spirit is so indwelling me that I can grieve him. I can grieve his spirit.
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Do we know this God in this way? Do we know the
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God who grieves over sin? Not as a surprised creator, not as some helpless spectator, but as a long -suffering, sin -hating
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God who then gives his only son to be a ransom for many so that whoever believes on him will not perish in some flood of his wrath, but have everlasting life in him.
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Do you know the man of sorrows? In other words, do you know this man of sorrows? Do you know why he's a man of sorrows?
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Do you know why he pursues the joy that's set before him? The joy on the other side of that flood, the joy on the other side of that wrath.
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Do you know God in this way? Let's pray.
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Father, we thank you for your word, Lord. We thank you for the things that are hard to understand and mysterious, the things that we simply bow to, realms that human eyes have not seen,
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Lord, dynamics that you must reveal to us. And in that very vein,
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Lord, we're given that revelation of how you see the world, how you see sinfulness and what you'll do in light of that.
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You who are so full of compassion and love, that though you grieve over sin, you suffer with it long, you bear it.
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Even until the fullness of time when you send your Son, made in the likeness of a slave, obedient to the point of death, that man of sorrows who wept over Jerusalem, who wept over sinful hardiness and sinful rebellion, who wept over the ignorance and the blindness and the dullness of your people, who weeps over a world that is lost, and yet out of his great love, out of his incarnate love, reconciles that world to you, so that we don't have to be men and women of sorrow and women of grief, but that we might have that everlasting joy that he has with you.
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Help us, Lord, as we're here below in our walk, to be sensitive to the Spirit, Lord, and not to grieve him, to be aware,
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Lord, that our sins bring you displeasure, that they grieve you as a rebellious child grieves a father or a mother, or that we would be slow and cognizant, aware,
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Lord, of the decisions we make and the manner in which we carry ourselves, that we would love you because of your great love, that we would seek to please you through our obedience,
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Lord, as feeble and fickle as it may be, Lord, that we would have a desire to please you, knowing that you have given all to bring us close to you, that you did not spare your own son to redeem us,
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Lord, and if you did not spare your own son, what would you spare? What will you hold back? What good thing would you keep from us?
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Help us to love you, Lord, knowing that you're so full of compassion, help us to love you rightly and to share to this lost, dying, hardened world something of this love through our faith and our fervent pursuit of you.